With opaque pricing, scam tickets and dodgy service endemic in the sector, Ticombo stands and a brash new player which is taking a hatchet to the established way of doing things. A game-changing business case study… Launched in 2016 in Germany, AVA is based in Berlin and is an excellent example of the power of using transparency and user-oriented innovation to disrupt an entire market category.
“The first true C2C marketplace to buy and sell tickets in an efficient, transparent, and secure way,” the company believes it’s changing the way fans, event organizers, and resellers are interacting in the secondary ticketing market.
The problem: A crisis of trust in the market
The prevailing ticketing industry has been plagued by systemic problems for many years, and it was these shortcomings that the Ticombo founders had encountered with the passing of decades working in the industry. Ticket fraud is a growing issue across the ticketing industry that represents a huge financial liability to ticket purchasers and sellers and can cause a disruption to the overall event experience.
Consumer Challenges Beyond the fraud, meal-kit customers experienced further issues such as:
Inflated pricing with little transparency
"It's a little buyer and seller are limited to chat with.
Unreliable customer service
Lack of confidence in ticket validity or promptness of delivery
These failures opened the door for a platform that could deal with the trust deficit and do a better job with
the user experience.
Ticombo's Innovation Framework
Transparency as Core Value
Ticombo’s unique selling point with over platforms is its stoic transparency and security. Buyers and sellers can chat directly, and buyers also can review sellers on the site. All the details of each property are presented in the listing information.
This transparency shows up in a couple of key ways:
Real Time Communication: The platform allows buyers to communicate with sellers directly in real time, which eliminates information gap sellers used to take advantage of to cut deals on secondary market.
Links Provided: Buyers can contact sellers by clicking on their name to inquire about their package’s delivery or add the seller’s contact information to their Priority List.
Rating System: A fair feedback rating system is used to help buyers evaluate sellers thus establishing
trust and credibility.
Security Through Innovation
Ticombo has several security levels to prevent fraud:
Check Listing Review and Identity Verification: We verify every ticket seller to make sure the tickets are legitimate and you're getting what you paid for (secure, prompt on-time delivery and top quality).
TixProtect Warranty: The smartwatch has 30-day warranty, you don't need to worry the problems and we will solve it for you by our support team.
Four Seller Tiers: The service partners with several types of sellers, including official organizers who are selling first hand tickets on Ticombo, which means you get official tickets straight from the organizer/team.
Market Performance and Validation
That model works: Ticombo has outperformed the market handily.
Customer Reviews: Ticombo is rated 4 stars from 2,571 customer reviews with many continuation to admire the trustworthiness of the site.
European Accreditation: Ticombo is granted the Seal of Excellence in Open Disruptive Innovation scheme by European Commission in 2017.
Growth Curve: With 74 employees, it’s large by startup standards in this space, and the $13.7M in annual revenue is formidable.
Leadership and Vision
Led by industry veteran and CEO Atle Barlaup, with more than 30 years in the business, Ticombo has remained true to user-first. Barlaup stresses about gaining insights and using from feedback from all teams to "prioritize and do optimal products and processes" as well as developing "culture of making the end user number one, transparency, business ethics (cpa), best customer service."
"My guidance to new business owners is to focus on great customer service, innovation and disrupt traditional markets," Barlaup says. At Ticombo, we embrace these ideals, shaking up and re-inventing the world of business."
Innovation in Practice
Fair Pricing Mechanisms
This is to prevent fans from being gouged by inflated prices; Ticombo put a cap on the markup on tickets so that all the fans pay a fair price or even pay under face value occasionally.
Technology Integration
The platform shows dedication to technological evolution with:
AI integration: Recent collaboration with Google focuses on the integration of AI in a bid to enhance user
experience
Social Media Integration:ShopSneaker Online buyers can login through social media websites to register and purchase, which makes it more transparent and stronger to operate.
Multiple Ticket Formats Supported: The system is capable of taking various ticket formats such as PDF and mobile passes
Strategic Partnerships and Growth
Ticombo’s thinking about innovation also encompasses strategic alliances. Meetings with Google over the past year have revolved around “potential collaboration areas and synergies that will pave the way for innovation, expansion and scale up to next level”.
This collaboration approach signifies the company's recognition that disruption in the ticketing world relies on the power of the ecosystem rather than standalone product development.
Challenges and Market Response
Being a marketplace platform, Ticombo is not immune to such issues, although it’s certain interesting measures of protection and guarantees may shift that into an entirely different direction than the norm. There are some users who complain about counterfeit sellers, which demonstrates the constant effort required to police the integrity of a marketplace at the scale that extension ropes in.
That said, the company's initial response shows that it's very much in line with their stance towards transparency - rather than not portraying bad reviews, it embraces bad reviews and adapts around what children (or their parents) find problematic to ensure it's doing things in the best possible way.
Business Impact and Industry Influence
Ticombo’s strategy has wider implications for marketplace design:
The Trust-First Architecture: By building trust by means of transparency instead of only focusing on transactions, the solution illustrates how trust can be a competitive edge.
Community: Reviews and direct conversation fosters more of a sense of community among users, making it stickier.
Mandates for Fair Pricing: The ceiling challenge is the pricing freedom of a profession versus what is fair to the consumer?
Future Implications
Some lessons for marketplace innovation in Ticombo’s success include:
Transparency for Distinction: In industries where trust is low, radical transparency can provide a significant point of differentiation
User Intuitive Design: Focusing on experience rather than on making quick bucks helps to grow your success in the long run.
Integration of Technology: The application of new technologies such as AI can add greater benefi ts to existing transacti on marketplace functionality.
Community Development: Authentic user communities are long-term competitive moats
Ticombo is much more than a successful startup; it’s a case study of how market transparency and customer-based innovation can shake up a market with entrenched incumbents. By solving issues of basic trust in the ticketing market using technology and openness, the company has built a long-term business in which all parties involved benefit.
"As we go around building the platform and setting new, high efficiencies and customer satisfaction around the platform, we are basically a blueprint on how marketplaces are disrupted through innovation and transparency. The company's success is proof that as tech savvy consumers continue to demand greater transparency, any business that genuinely values honesty and a memorable customer experience, can dominate their industry.
For business leaders and entrepreneurs, Ticombo is a reminder that sometimes the best innovations our world needs don’t come from creating new products, necessarily, but from reinvisioning how the markets that exist, work better for the folks who are apart of securing trust in an industry.
Media Contact
Company Name: Ticombo
Contact Person: Kris
Email: Send Email
Country: United States
Website: https://www.ticombo.com/en
